Charles Dickens | Arts Research

Victorian Periodicals Through Glass: Reflections on the Theory and Practice of Digitising Nineteenth-Century Newspapers and Magazines

The Athenaeum Club, Pall Mall, London.
Friday 15 July 2016

When the flagship Journal of Victorian Culture announced its intention in 2008 to “act as a forum for digital research on the nineteenth century and for discussion of its relationship with traditional scholarship,” it was an acknowledgement that a wide range of nineteenth century research communities had become actively engaged with the imaginative and critical possibilities opened up by the digital world. Since then, its ‘Digital Forum’ section has included challenging work from a wide range of perspectives and chronicled the growth of this discipline over the past eight years.

Similarly, since Dickens Journals Online was launched publicly in 2012, the digital reception and exploration of Victorian periodicals and Dickens’s work has enjoyed an exponential growth; last year’s Being Human festival offered a showcase for some of the most interesting and innovative digital Dickens projects happening today, including The Drood Inquiry and the Our Mutual Friend reading project and Twitter group.

Most recently, Birkbeck’s online academic journal ‘19’ (itself an innovation in digital studies of the long nineteenth century) devoted its entire 10th anniversary edition for Winter 2015 to lengthier meditations on an array of exciting endeavours within the burgeoning nineteenth-century digital archive, including the digitization of Blake’s work and the cultivation of new research networks and discourses through digital projects.

Join us then for ‘Victorian Periodicals Through Glass’, a one-day conference running in conjunction with the Sally Ledger Memorial Lecture on Friday 15th July 2016 at The Athenaeum Club, Pall Mall. At this stunning and evocative venue, we are gathering together the leading thinkers and practitioners on the use of digital resources as research tools in 19th-century literary scholarship. We warmly encourage 19th-century scholars of all kinds to join us for a stimulating programme of theoretical discussions and practical expositions. We also encourage and call for proposals for both 20-minute spoken papers and 10- to 15-minute A2 poster presentations from

current or recent postgraduate students who use of digital resources in their research on Victorian periodicals or any other aspect of 19th-century literary studies
teams or solo practitioners working on digital editions or digital representations of nineteenth-century periodicals, whether Open Access or subscription-based

Topics may include, but are not confined to:

Research projects that are explicitly predicated on the use of digital material
The boons and methodological challenges of using such material
Comparisons between digital and older forms of resource
Creative uses of digital material in your work
How digital resources have shaped or will shape your research

Deadline for proposals: 29 February 2016. 500 words max; 1 page attachment; mail to djo@buckingham.ac.uk Successful proposals will be announced by 20 March 2016

The next event of the autumn term for the Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies will feature Richard Adelman (Sussex) presenting on ‘Our “Strange Disquietude”: Ruskin and Gothic Literature’ on Thursday 12 November 2015 from 7.30pm to 9.00pm in the Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD.

John Ruskin’s account of the gothic spirit, from the central chapter of The Stones of Venice, ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (published in 1853), is highly influential and much fêted. Such influence has long been recognized over figures such as William Morris, over the architectural practices of Victorian Britain, and over political economic thought, especially after Ruskin’s 1862 publication of ‘Unto This Last’, which develops the earlier work’s critique of laissez-faire economics. But Ruskin’s innovative theorization of the concept of the gothic in ‘The Nature of Gothic’ has never been connected with gothic literature itself. This is a significant oversight, as this paper will demonstrate, one that has left a fundamental shift in Victorian gothic literature unrecognized, and that has allowed the eighteenth-century, consistently negative associations of the gothic to stand unchallenged in the very different world of post-Ruskinian gothic literature. Ruskin’s considerable influence over gothic fiction will be reconstructed, in this paper, by analysis of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1886).

The session is free and all are welcome, but since the venue has limited space it will be first come, first seated.

For more information, see: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research_cncs/birkbeck-forum-for-nineteenth-century-studies.

Please email c19@bbk.ac.uk to join our mailing list or to obtain further information about the series.

. . Category: Archived Events . Tags: Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies, Centre for C19th studies, Charles Dickens, Gothic, John Ruskin, Our Strange Disquietude, Richard Adelman, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sheridan Le Fanu, Sussex

Tag Archives: Charles Dickens

Call for Papers: ‘Victorian Periodicals Through Glass’, deadline 29 February 2016

Our ‘Strange Disquietude’ – Birkbeck Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies: 12 November 2015